


BenT Or, Dances With Wolf

by executrix



Category: Firefly, due South
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-27
Updated: 2011-04-27
Packaged: 2017-10-18 17:29:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/191415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Detective First Grade Ray Kovecki of Tsai-Ka-Gau PD is still partnered with a Mountie, but it's a different Mountie. Dief and River understand each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	BenT Or, Dances With Wolf

**Author's Note:**

> 5-2-0 is Cantonese text message-ese for "I love you." I am neutral in The Ray Wars, so I came up with a composite "Kovecki."

_It's the wrong game,  
For the wrong chips,  
And although your lips are tempting,  
They're the wrong lips…_

 **1\. (Downplanet: Tsai-Ka-Gau)**  
Detective First Grade Ray Kovecki, Tsai-Ka-Gau PD, inhaled a doughnut (crème-filled chocolate), chewed a sip of vending machine coffee, and looked up from the paper.  
"Did you SEE this, Benny?" he asked. "The Cubs got slaughtered. Again."

"That's….appalling. That's the worst thing I've ever heard…no, it's not, but… They allow bear-baiting here?"

The soft voice caused Ray to look up, shocked. As there was on so many mornings, a handsome man in the red tunic and stupid Smoky the Bear hat of the Royal Aberdonian Mounted Police stood next to his desk.

Except, that this time, it was the **wrong one**. A noticeably smaller one, possibly an Econo-Mountie. And, because he was shorter than the right…than the previous…Mountie, what Ray realized he thought of as Part of This Complete Breakfast wasn't visible over his desk.

Ray really wondered, in the specialized sense of "hoping to hell that he never found out," just when he had started checking out Mountie crotch.

"Didn't they send you the memo?" the other, replacement-type guy said. He had beautiful blue eyes too. "I'm afraid that Constable Fraser has been transferred for…an undercover assignment…of indefinite duration. I'm Benedict Tam. Constable Benedict Tam."

 **2 (Same place, the previous day; and then Serenity)**  
As was his wont, Constable Benton Fraser, RAMP, strolled past one of the many noisome alleys between his humble abode and his place of business, the Consulate of the Kingdom of Snows and Maple. He heard words drifting out, and relished the opportunity to practice his rather rusty Mandarin. "Syphilitic sodomite of a…" could it really have been "hollow stem of water spinach and simultaneously of a flexible muffin tin?" But then the speaker switched to StandardTalk. "That's my pay packet! And the baby's sick!" followed by the unmistakeable thud of fist assaulting flesh. Fraser began to run, whistling for Dief to follow him.

They rushed into the alley where a tragic scene played out. Fraser could tell that the assailant's face, now bestially distorted by habitual depravity, had once borne traces of intelligence, or even nobility. "Sir, you are under arrest," he told the malefactor. "Kindly lie down on the ground, with your hands behind your head." He turned to the victim, still pressed against the wall, one hand behind his back. What a contrast! The fair-haired, brilliant-shirted man's mild blue eyes showed someone who went through the 'Verse peaceably, asking nothing but a return of the respect he gave to his neighbors. "It's all right, friend," Fraser said soothingly. "You're safe now."

Wash quick-drew the dart gun from his back holster and pumped one into Dief and one into Fraser. Mal stood up and brushed himself off. He checked the burlap bag of Ten-Bean Soup Mix that he'd whacked against the brick wall. It was Kaylee's favorite, and she'd kill him if he failed to bring it back from the market in usable shape.

That night, pins flew, and Inara's sewing machine hummed.

 **3 (Chez Fra')**  
It wasn't particularly difficult for Simon to get into Fraser's apartment, what with the never-locked door not being locked. So he didn't actually need the keys on the keyring that Zoe had unclipped from Fraser's belt loop after they kidnapped him.

The apartment, although far from luxurious, wasn't really any worse than his recent past domicile, but Simon shivered nonetheless. There was something sad about the place. Or maybe just lonely. Simon went into the bathroom to wash up. Clearly, there were products there, but it was not at all obvious which were supposed to be applied to the integument and which ones were for scrubbing the (admirably clean) floors. So he went outside again and wandered around until he found a store open and bought a bottle of eucalyptus soap and a toothbrush and toothpaste and deodorant and a tube of shaving cream and a disposable razor and a hairbrush.

He went back to Fraser's building, paused for a hallway colloquium about Mrs. Liubjovsky's arthritis, and unlocked the door. He made a brief sweep around the small apartment, his gun pointed upward and held tightly against the side of his head because he figured it would be difficult to shoot himself in that position.

Simon tried the vizcast player—it did have a picture, of a sort, but there was no sound. He looked at the snowy images for a few minutes, making up his own stories, and then looked around for something to read. The only books he could find were a few leather-bound notebooks, stacked next to the mattress on the floor. Simon changed into his pajamas, set the alarm clock, and started to read. The notebooks evidently represented investigation notes taken by a RAMP officer, but they often strayed away from the case at hand to matters more generally philosophic.

Around midnight, Simon closed the book in his hand, reached up to turn out the lamp, and froze. A man in late middle age, wearing the RAMP dress tunic, jodhpurs, and laced boots (but, apparently, only half a hat) stood a few feet from the bed.

"Robert Fraser," he said. "Who the hell are you?"

" **What** are you?" Simon countered. "The door's locked, I closed the windows before anything worse happened to the brass monkey, and I know you weren't hiding here when I got back, because I checked."

"I'm Benton's father," he said.

"But you're…." Simon began, realizing that on occasion he had had to disclose an, as it were, XXTreme Poor Prognosis to the already-grieving watchers in the Waiting Room, but he had never had occasion to break it to the deceased him- or herself.

"Dead," Fraser Sr. said.

Simon took a deep breath, assured himself that his pulse still beat temperately, and asked, as casually as he could, "So, you're here to urge your son on toward revenge?"

"No," Fraser Sr. said. "He's doing fine on his own. But I wasn't much of a father to the lad when he was growing up, I like to do what I can now, to help him out. You know how it is."

"Not really," Simon said. "I'm alive, my father pretends that I'm dead. It's an entirely different dynamic."

"You still haven't answered my question."

Simon decided that it would be pointless to lie. "I'm impersonating your son," he said. "My sister and I are fugitives from a government that injured and traumatized her severely for reasons that I still haven't fathomed. We—my friends and I—decided that Tsai-Ka-Gau was, quite frankly, the most primitive and unpromising and altogether shabby place we could locate that would still have a connection to the central warrants database. So I'm here to hack the warrants DB so we'll fall below the law enforcement radar. But I assure you, no one intends any harm to Constable Fraser. I'm sure he'll be fine. Home safe in a few days." (Thoughts of various conflicts that were supposed to be Over By Christmas flashed through his mind.)

"It'll never work, you know," Fraser Sr. said. "It may take decades and cohesive efforts of both the living and the dead, but you can't get away with wrongdoing."

"'Right forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne,'" Simon sang monotonally.

"Where would civilization be without rules?" Fraser Sr. asked. "Our little families teach us the values we need to operate in a national family."

Simon flinched. "Well, there's an old saying," he said. "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I'd have the guts to betray my country. I suppose that, in a family, the strongest person can compel the obedience of the weaker ones—but isn't a real family one that protects its weakest members?"

Fraser Sr., preparing to dematerialize, shook his head. "Remember, the weed of Crime bears bitter fruit. Anything else you want to know?"

"The stuff in the blue tin in the bathroom," Simon said. He didn't want to ask something like "Is River ever going to get better?" or "When am I going to die?" for fear of hearing the answer, so he picked a question whose response he could cope with. "What **is** it?"

"Tooth powder," Fraser Sr. told him. "Part dried fern leaves, part roasted beaver bones. Study the wilderness, young man. The wilderness furnishes us with everything we need. The beaver, now…some damn fine eating there."

"'So I have heard, and do in part believe,'" Simon said.

 **4 (Serenity)**  
Dief awoke first, and stood across Fraser's body protectively. A few minutes later, the door slid open, and two female humans walked in. One of them carried a bowl of water in one hand and a bowl of protein in the other. This female human put down the bowls where Dief could reach them and knelt down to hug him. "Good doggie!" he read.

The other, more juvenile, female human carried a tray full of food that she set down on the night table. "Kaylee, that wolf is deaf," she said. "There's no point talking to him."  
This female squatted down on the ground, in front of Dief's face. "Mostly harmless," her fingers wove in Mandarin Sign Language.

The first female human took a blanket off the bed and spread it over Fraser. "Awww," she said. "Isn't he shuai? Sure hate for him to get a cold down there."

Shortly thereafter, Fraser woke, shook his head to clear it, rose shakily to his feet, and glanced around the room. "Are you all right, Dief?" Dief looked back at him, eminently healthy. "Good boy. Now, I'll try to find out where we are, and why we were abducted…run outside and try to get help…"

Dief cocked a cynical ear at him.

"Breaking atmo now, Captain," Wash said over the Comm, and Fraser felt the engines thrum beneath the floor.

"Bit of a facer, Dief, but nothing we can't handle," Fraser told him.

 **5 (T-K-G PD HQ)**  
"This is a bad one, Tam," Ray said, looking down at the black and white captures in the topmost file in the avalanche-prone pile on his desk. "Coupla dead bodies turn up every month or so, same dumping grounds. First off, I thought it was a gang thing, but it turns out it's illegals. Guys bein' smuggled in, only, there's maybe a hunnerd of 'em, and like, five die of thirst, or they're packed too near the engine so they die of burns, or they suffocate, or get poisoned by the engine gases…"

"Illegals?" Simon blurted. "You mean there are places bad enough that they deliberately come **here**?" When he saw Ray's face, he ducked his head and murmured, "Sorry. Sorry."

"'Sokay, we think you MapleSnow guys are weird anyway. So what I thought is, whoever's dumping the bodies probably works for the guy doing the trafficking. So if we catch him, then we're heroes. Except we're, like, heroes like a, whaddaya call that thing, y'know, for draining macaroni?"

"A colander?" Simon suggested, as Ray pantomimed shaker-straining.

Detective Huey, walking past, grimaced.

"Yeah. Like that. 'Cause, the guy we bust wants to kill us, natch. And they probably walk him to come and do it too, 'cause nobody saw nothin' and nobody knows nothin', so even my ex couldn't make it stick."

"Oh. Your former…partner? Wife? Is a prosecutor?"

"Yeah. Why, you got a girlfriend who's a lawyer?"

" **So** very not."

"And whoever's got all these ships and stuff to smuggle those poor bastards in probably buys Parliamentarians like I'd buy a pack of gum. Well, I'd probably swipe it, but same diff."

"So I take it that we're going to put in the pretense of a minimal effort and then lose the file?"

"Take it back out from where you shoved it, Mountie. We're workin' this case 'till we crack it."

"Detective Kovecki, why do you want to devote considerable effort and perhaps undertake some risk to solve a possibly insoluble case, when nobody will so much as be grateful?"

Ray snorted. "'Cause the reason they pay us the small bucks is to give a shit if some guys kill other guys. Or even just let other guys drop dead. Which Bennie would know already if he was here instead of where they sent him."

 **6 (Serenity)**  
"Y'know, Mal," Jayne said, "I liked it a lot better when if you had any kinda boyfriend whatsoever you kept it to yourself and on top o' that he didn't have no wingnut sister that talks with her hands to dogs."

"Autres temps, autres moeurs," Mal said. "What, I can't know more than two languages? Look, Jayne, when you have your own boat, which, let me hasten to add would be this one only over your dead body and not mine, you can use it to tumble wombats if you care to. But here and now, if you want to think about the romantical aspects of my existence, **don't**."

 **7 (A Noisome Rookery)**  
"Open up!" Detective Kovecki yelled. "Police!" They didn't expect much of a result, but the only lead they had was the piece of paper in one of the dead guys' pockets. There was a groan as ancient windows were thrown open for the first time in decades, and a rattle as a fragile fire escape shook beneath many pairs of feet.

By the time Ray kicked the door down, there was nobody inside at all. Like a sailing ship, it was neatly crowded to stow a great many objects of small monetary value belonging to many very poor people of diverse ages.

Simon bent down to the diaper pail and sniffed. "That's very interesting," he said. "That particular odor—like hoisin sauce--is associated with a specific auto-immune disease. It's caused by a translocation on one of the arms of Chromosome 11…and it's almost certain that both of the baby's parents are from Zenarte-3. Does that help?"

"Awww, fug. You don't **lick** stuff, do you?" Ray asked.

Simon blinked. "Only when it's appropriate," he said.

 **8 (Serenity-Simon's Room)**  
It was Kaylee's shift. It was one duty that she did not find particularly onerous; in fact, because the engine was in reasonable shape, she arrived early to give the rival of her watch a few extra minutes off.

"Betcha it was quiet," she said. "Not a mouse stirrin', Oh," she said, a little shocked (and surprised that she would be). "Interruptin' somethin'?"

"Hell, no," Jayne said. "Just playin' cards. He ain't got no money, so I thought, under the Geneva Convention, I should make it interestin'."

"Jayne, are those them cards that you carry 'round in your pants?" Kaylee asked, her indignant hands on her hips. "That ain't just disgustin', it's…" she turned to Fraser. "Mr. Benton, you should not take it as any aspersion on your card-playin' skills, 'cause that deck o'his has fifty-five cards. Jayne, you get outta here. Mal's yellin' for you to go pump out the ballast tank."

"Ain't my problem, it's his," Jayne said. "Won it off him fair and square."

"Yeah, like cheatin' him at cards is fair and square. And he's supposed to be locked up in here till Simon…oops!…anyway, he ain't supposed to be out where he could think he could hijack the ship and then Zoe'd have to hurt him."

"Hey!" Jayne said, his professional pride ruffled. "I could hurt him!"

"Not now that he's your new best friend and all," she said.

Jayne put on his right boot, buttoned up his shirt, and left in a huff.

"I apologize for my malfunctioning wardrobe, Miss Frye," Fraser said, removing Jayne's hat from his lap, preparatory to standing up and retrieving the rest of his garments in order of saliency.

However, Kaylee soon took the place of the hat. "Ain't your fault," she said. And, by analogy with the good hostess who slurps up the fingerbowl to prevent embarrassing a guest, Kaylee soon removed some of her own garments even though she had missed the strip poker game. ("Go get somethin' 'twixt your nethers that might catch some o' that Stockholm Syndrome," Mal had suggested, Kaylee replied,. "Great minds think alike, Cap'n,")

In some ways, this young woman reminded Fraser of his partner's sister, Francesca. But then, as the great treatise Marple on Criminology points out, it is often productive for the investigator to reason from personality patterns already encountered in life.

 **9 (A Restaurant Not Found in Zagat's)**  
Ray had a chat with some of his snitches, who said that there was this old guy, owned a restaurant, who was The Old Guy for the Zenartenese community.

Ray looked over at Simon, who had a blissfully abstracted look on his face as he slurped up noodles in a way that would have caused bloodshed at a Kovecki Sunday dinner table.  
"It's very good," Simon said. "Ray, you need to eat…"

"What is it?"

"Soup! And noodles, and lotus root and prawns and fish balls…"

"Hey, way to go, girl fish. They deserve to catch a break sometimes. But this stuff, it smells like…"

Simon kicked his ankle under the table as the restaurant owner approached.

"Ah, Mr. Covarrubias," Ray said. "Thank you for having this sit-down with us. And thank you for this very excellent meal which I only didn't eat any of because I gotta go home after this. Ma's makin' gravy. What we wanna talk to you about, is this amnesia epidemic you folks are having. Not that I'm surprised 'cause mostly what I do is go around and talk to witnesses that aren't because all of a sudden they got Instant Blind and also they don't remember nothin'."

"Maybe that's because you have Wall Hammer disease, and they caught it from you," Simon said, with some asperity.

Ray kicked **his** ankle.

"Are there any babies in your community that were born healthy, but after about five months, regress developmentally? I mean, that get weaker instead of stronger, and lose the ability to cry normally?" Simon asked, turning to the restaurant owner.

"Jenny," Covarrubias said. "And, last year, the Mdvidenkos lost their twins."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Simon said, reaching into the inside pocket in his tunic. "Here, give Jenny's parents these pills. They replace a chemical that her body has trouble making. And—is it the custom for people from Zenarte-3 to marry each other—uhh, to marry other people from the same moon? Cousins, maybe?"

The restaurateur nodded. "I thought so," Simon said, writing on a fisopfiber napkin. "Please tell everyone that when a woman is pregnant, to prevent this disease, she should eat a lot of…ummm, brown rice bran. Or pickled tassifer root. Red cooraboo, that's good too. There's a test, but forget it, I know it's too expensive, nobody can afford it." He passed the napkin across the table.

{{Mother of God}} thought Covarrubias. {{A human being is expected to be able to read such handwriting?}} He took a deep breath. "All right. What do you want to know?"

"Dead illegals," Ray said. "How're they getting here?"

"There's a man," Covarrubias said. "He goes around to several of the Border moons, finds the most desperate of the desperate. First he takes all their money, and then when they are smuggled to another place—yes, I know, this is not the Faubourgs of Londinium, but it is richer than those tiny poor places—he makes them pay him most of their earnings to repay him again for their passage."

"Charming," Ray said, taking the little datapad out of his jacket pocket and pulling out the stylus. "Guy got a name?"

"Heckstauhll," Covarrubias told him, just as the newest-hired of the waiters came out of the kitchen, followed by a man who wasn't carrying a tray of crystal shrimp dumplings.  
"Oh," Covarrubias said, looking past the waiter. "No wonder you didn't complain about the wages."

The man who wasn't carrying a tray, and who was carrying a machine pistol, cracked the waiter across the face with it. "You were supposed to call me **before** he dimed me," he said.

"Drop it!" Ray yelled, drawing his service piece out of the other pocket.

Heckstauhll loosed a burst of bullets at the back wall, sending Covarrubias and the two patrons diving under the tables and stitching up two framed fake tapestries (cranes; a snowcapped mountain).

Ray checked to see if Tam were in the line of fire. Simon rolled on the floor, where he had been putting a compress made out of a napkin and the ice from a glass of water on the waiter's face, landing behind Ray. Simon stood up, knees bent, holding a .38 automatic, his left hand bracing his right wrist.

{{Hey}} Ray thought. {{This one's got a gun! Too bad he's holdin' it like a spinster with the rheumatiz' holdin' a dick.}}

 **10 (Serenity)**  
Inara convinced Mal, by dint of a single death-dealing glare, that Fraser was on his parole to behave between Simon's room and Inara's shuttle (and, anyway, Book was right behind him), and that she would be responsible for him in the shuttle.

She served them her best white tea and ground-minaubo-nut cakes. She played a sonata Fraser had never heard before, and he taught her how to hammer off barchords on the shamisen. Book sat in on tabla.

 **11 (A Scene of Insurance Adjustment)**  
Heckstauhll ran out of the restaurant backwards, sweeping his machine pistol in a wide arc. A moment after the door slammed, there was a squeal of tires, and Ray braced himself for the crash of glass as Bennie would dive through the plate-glass window and sprint down the street after the speeding mule. A resigned Ray was halfway to his feet when he saw the current model Bennie flipping open his handcomm. "Miss Besbriss?" he said. "I swiped in the numbers of all the one to four person mules Detective Kovecki and I passed within a two-block radius of this restaurant…ah, it's…." (he paused to read the placemat)…"the Green Star of Zenarte. Wait, I'll Wave you up the registration codes…"

"You aren't gonna go chase it?"

Simon shook his head. "That's a motor vehicle, Detective Kovecki. Even in my younger days, I couldn't accelerate from zero to sixty."

A minute later, Elaine called back and read out the list of names of the registered owners of the mules—Cruz; Poulter; Sakimoto; Chou; Heckstauhll…

"That's the one," Simon said. "Put out an APB on that one."

Twenty minutes later, a couple of uniforms in the Five-Five caught up with Heckstauhll's mule at a roadblock. They got the collar, and the Loo threw a fit at the amount of overtime Ray put in for.

 **12 (River's Room)**  
A cabin-fevered River signed her explanation: Lie down on my bed. I'll roll you up in the blankets.

{{How stupid can they be?}} Dief said. {{I mean, how could they not notice I'm a wolf? Even in the dark, the way my white fur…}}

Inside their heads, I'm a wolf, River signed. So we're even. Don't you ever want to run free? Stroke the warm fur of your own kind?

{{Dang ran}} Dief said. Then he howled. He missed his puppies.

 **13 (No Man's Land)**  
"I don't think I've ever seen you here before," Elaine said to the slim—tiny, really—girl demurely sipping a crème de menthe frappe through a little straw..

"This is the first time that I…needed assistance," the girl said. Elaine blinked. There was something familiar about her.

Just about then, Kaylee walked past River's door, heard the soft snores, and walked past, happy that River was sleeping so soundly. There was no reason for her to check whether Shuttle #2 was still docked or downplanet, parked outside a bar called The City of Ladies.

Later by some hours and drinks and dances (fast and slow). River, sleepless in a strange room, sat up, plaidded by the cold streetlight through the window blinds and the soft light of Elaine's bedside lamp. Elaine slumbered, her Zoe-like hair spilling over the pillow, cloaking the smile of repletion.

Elaine dreamed about work, and River pushed at Elaine's recollections until she could snip and gather them, like a gardener with a basket.

 **14 (Corner of No and Where)**  
"So, talk to me, man," Ray said, perched on the windowsill holding binoculars. Ray had grabbed the top file folder on his desk, which turned out to involve a suspected arson insurance scam, so they were staked out across the highway from a long row of warehouses. Simon, of course, had plenty of time on his hands since the MapleSnow Consulate didn't know him from Adam's off-ox, and they assumed that Fraser was taking some of his 29 accrued sick days. (By the time it occurred to Turnbull to wonder why Fraser had uncharacteristically failed to request leave, he was back.) "'Cause, y'know, the worst part of being a cop, it's the nothingness. Like, what was your biggest case?"

"There was a suspect," Simon said. "A…pirate. I tracked him for three days, until I finally found him…"

"And you got trapped in a cave?" Ray asked sympathetically. "Man, I hate it when that happens."

"No," Simon said. "Beneath a burning temple. And as the smoke billowed around us, and the air shimmered in parentheses of heat, he…saved me. He spoke to me. He recited poetry. He has…had a beautiful voice."

"So, what happened to him?"

"Well, I had a tracer in my uniform tunic and I called in at hourly intervals, so I sent a distress signal and a fire brigade arrived within twenty minutes. I turned him in, of course," Simon said. "It's….well, I do what I do. I am what I do."

"Long sentence, huh? I mean, in the slammer. For the guy. With you, when you talk it's always a long sentence."

"I hope so," Simon said. "I mean, sure, sometimes he thinks he wants to escape, but he's there for the long haul."

"Sounds like…you know, your tone of voice and all…like you kinda liked the guy."

"In this…well, in any society, really….there are a lot of things that are illegal that aren't really evil, or that aren't incompatible with decency or honor. On balance, he….wasn't all bad."

"No, I mean that you liked the guy."

"The RAMP is an inclusive force," Simon said.

"No shit?" Ray asked thoughtfully.

 **15 (In CortexSpace)**  
Simon waved up to Serenity. River answered. "Have you succeeded? Are you well-established on the throne?"

"How are you, River? Are you anxious? You can ask Mal to break one of the pink Parmetzolepam tablets in drawer F19 in half and give it to you, but not with milk…"

"Many fears have been allayed," River said. "Come back before Mal sprains his wrist. He'll want to know if you're doing what you're supposed to."

"Well, it's complicated. There was this crime…anyway, it took some time to solve it, so I don't have the codes yet…"

"Don't send a man to do a girl's work," River said proudly. She gave him the keycode sequence and the username and password to get into the Warrants server.

"River! That's…that's amazing. How'd you do it?"

"I have my methods, Watson," she said. "When will you be back?"

"Maybe tomorrow. I'll upwave. You know, I'm sort of enjoying it here."

"Not being out in the Black?"

"No, being honest. Tell Mal I miss him too. But don't tell him what I just said. Five-two-oh. Both of you."

River rolled her eyes. "Five-two-oh? That is SO last year. Anyway, it only saves time when you text it, not when you say it. Also, Simon, you thinking you're temporarily honest is like killing for peace. You're only down there to lie to everyone and perpetrate a fraud. So don't pat yourself on the back too much for your integrity."

 **16 (Serenity)**  
"Well, we got what we came here for, Constable," Mal told Fraser (after River had given him a suitably expurgated account of Simon's wave). "And we never had it in mind to harm you or your pup 'less you meant to wrong us. So the plan is, tomorrow mornin', soon's you have a chance to have your coffee, our pilot will put the two of you in the shuttle. Then he'll set you down outside town. Might be a bit of a walk, but you look like a fit man."

Kaylee nodded enthusiastically.

"We'll be out of atmo by the time you get to town, so's it won't do much good to chase after us, 'cause even I don't know what our next port of call will be, and there's a passel of empty space for one little Firefly to slip about in."

"Understood," Fraser said.

{{He understands. But he doesn't comprehend.}} Dief told River. {{He needs so much looking after.}}

"Hrrruff!" River agreed.

"Thank you kindly for the shirt, Mr. Cobb," Fraser said.

 **17 (Serenity)**  
Wash and Simon came in from Shuttle #2. Simon went over to River and gave her a hug. "You do good work, River. I found our warrants, and I overwrote them, and reported us Deceased, Apprehended, and gave us a Parliamentary pardon just for good measure."

"Huh," Mal said. "Good plan, then. Worked out shiny. So…I guess you're free to go, now that no one's lookin' for you. Let me know what you've in mind to do next."

Simon, his back still to Mal, leaned closer in toward River. "Yes, we can go. But…would it be all right with you if we stayed here for a little while? At least until we…figure some things out?"

"Can I have my own wolf, too?" River asked.

 **18 (Police HQ)**  
In Tsai-Ka-Gau, the motto is, "We don't want nobody nobody sent." If you don't got a bonze looking out for you, then nobody—least of all the Police Department—is really interested in your problems. So, when Constable Tam vanished as unpredictably as he had arrived, leaving behind only a thank-you note and a lavishly wrapped bottle of expensive sake for Ray and a bottle of perfume for Elaine, Ray tipped his head back and almost howled at the unresponding Cosmos, "Don't gimme any more guys that know everything!"

"Why, Ray?" Fraser asked, coming up behind him. He wore his jodhpurs and suspenders, but over a t-shirt that said "Soldier" in Mandarin. (Fraser had found the red jacket, like a shed cocoon, hanging on the coat rack in the squadroom, but so much fabric had been taken out of it that he couldn't even get one arm into it.) "Don't we come in useful?"

"Is that you, Frase'?"

Fraser nodded.

"It's really you?"

"Yes," Fraser said. "I was kidnapped, not transmutated."

"Awright!" Ray said, yanking on one suspender. "In here!" and opened the Supply Closet door. And then let go and let it slam shut, from the inside.

**Author's Note:**

> In 2005, I had a dial-up connection which was too slow to watch vids, so my first intensive exposure to vids was at ConneXions 2005. I spent the duration of several Due South vids thinking how hot Simon would look in the red jacket. I subsequently watched more than two seasons of Due South just to write this story.


End file.
